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Bomber

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As Deighton makes clear at the outset, this is a novel about a fictional event. The British base at Warley Fen, the Luftwaffe base at Kroonsdijik, and the bombed village of Altgarten (hit by mistake) are all inventions. To hammer home this point, the raid takes place on June 31, a date that Deighton cheekily reminds us, never occurred “in 1943 or any other year.” The British grammar school is a state-funded institution which can select its own pupils based on academic ability. There are no fees for attending. A public school is a fee-paying institution, associated with the ruling class and upper echelons of banking, business and industry. [24] [25] In England they’re filled with curiosity and keep asking, ‘Why doesn’t he come?’ Be calm. Be calm. He’s coming! He’s Coming!” During the mid-1960s Deighton wrote for Playboy as a travel correspondent, and he provided a piece on the boom in spy fiction; An Expensive Place to Die was serialised in the magazine in 1967. [32] In 1968 Deighton was the producer of the film Only When I Larf, which was based on his novel of the same name. [33] He was the writer and co-producer of Oh! What a Lovely War in 1969, but did not enjoy the process of making films, and had his name removed from the film's credits. [5] [34] In 1970 Deighton wrote Bomber, a fictional account of an RAF Bomber Command raid that goes wrong. [15] To produce the novel he used an IBM MT/ST, and it is possible that this was the first novel to be written using a word processor. [35] [36] Deighton was interviewed on Desert Island Discs in June 1976 by Roy Plomley. [37] [h]

I thought the character development was decent, I guess. I could not quite decide if the ‘main character’ [Douglas Archer] is a neutral party, a collaborator, or a ‘patriot’ in sheep’s clothing. I still cannot quite decide what the man is. I know at the end of the book he appears to finally decide ‘where he stands’, but I am still not 100% certain of his motivations. Oskar Huth was an ‘interesting’ antagonist, I guess. He is an SS officer with his own motivations who was brought in to investigate the murdered man. He seemed to take an interest in Archer to the point of protecting Archer from some bad decisions as well as offering Archer a place on his [Huth’s] staff. Fritz Kellerman is the man in charge of occupied-England, and he wishes to see what he sees as stains on the German Army’s honor removed as well as to maintain his ‘kingdom’ in England. Hines, Claire (2018). The Playboy and James Bond: 007, Ian Fleming and Playboy magazine. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-1-5261-1616-1. Kerridge, Jake (14 February 2009). "The Deighton file: a life of reluctance and intrigue". The Daily Telegraph. p.10. Whitworth, Damian (11 February 2017). "There's a Nazi in No 10 and the SS in Scotland Yard". The Times. Several of Deighton's novels have been adapted as films, which include The Ipcress File (1965), Funeral in Berlin (1966), Billion Dollar Brain (1967) and Spy Story (1976). All feature the books' unnamed character, but they were given the full name " Harry Palmer" for the films; either the actor Michael Caine—who played Palmer in the films—or the producer for two of the three films, Harry Saltzman, came up with the name. [70] [71] Two television films also featured Palmer: Bullet to Beijing (1995) and Midnight in Saint Petersburg (1996); they were not based on Deighton's stories. All the films except Spy Story feature Caine as Palmer. [72] Deighton's hands were used in The Ipcress File in place of Caine's for a scene in which Palmer breaks eggs into a bowl and whisks them. [73] In March 2022 The Ipcress File, a television adaptation of Deighton's novel, was broadcast on UK television. Joe Cole was Palmer; Lucy Boynton and Tom Hollander also appeared in major roles. [74] [75]

He also wrote travel guides and became travel editor of Playboy, before becoming a film producer. After producing a film adaption of his 1968 novel Only When I Larf, Deighton and photographer Brian Duffy bought the film rights to Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop's stage musical Oh, What a Lovely War! He had his name removed from the credits of the film, however, which was a move that he later described as "stupid and infantile." That was his last involvement with the cinema. It`s very interesting to see the struggle for power inside the Nazi camp where we could find different parties with not so similar goals. Bomber was announced, on 1 February 2010, as one of twenty-one titles longlisted for the " Lost Man Booker Prize" of 1970, a contest delayed by 40 years because a reshuffling of the fledgeling competition's rules that year disqualified nearly a year's worth of high-quality fiction from consideration. [4] The book did not make the shortlist. Part of the reason for the ponderousness of Bomber is the literary weight of what Deighton is trying to do - conveying the brutality of war, the waste of a generation of young men, while making his portrayal evenhanded with the reader caring for people on both sides. The unpleasantness of twentieth century warfare and its wastefulness is a common theme from All Quiet on the Western Front to Mash, but it is far harder to think of other examples of war novels which do not just concentrate on one side. In many cases, the ability this gives to have a small number of central characters makes the writing more effective than it is here - the main characters in All Quiet on the Western Front form a single platoon of German soldiers, and M.A.S.H. never looks far beyond just two doctors. By contrast, there are dozens of characters in Bomber of approximately equal importance, which causes serious difficulties - they tend to be introduced with dull and lengthy biographical sketches, holding up the plot, and it is hard for the reader to remember who is who. (This second is a problem even in War and Peace, the most famous "cast of thousands" novel.) I certainly had the impression that Deighton's ambition here overreached his technique. Nevertheless, there are things to admire about the novel. Bomber is meticulously researched, with close attention to detail. (In current TV terminology, Bomber would definitely belong to the genre of docudrama.) I thought it was morbidly ‘fascinating’ how the Brits wanted the King to be freed from London Tower, but they also wanted him killed before reaching North America. Well, specifically, some of the leaders of the ‘resistance’ movement wanted the King killed. He was too old and ineffectual to be of any political use to anyone, and in North America he would be revealed to be even more powerless than he was previously believed to have been. The resistance leaders wanted either the Queen or one of the Princesses in power, and that could only happen if the King were removed. By having the Germans kill him while attempting to escape, the resistance made a martyr of the King. This gave the man more political power than he ever had while alive.

Douglas Archer, Archer of the Yard, is an inspector at Scotland Yard, a near celebrity for the astuteness he has shown for solving cases. His boss is General Fritz Kellerman of the German army. His other boss is SS-Standartenfuhrer Dr. Oskar Huth, who is from Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff. His Detective Sergeant is Harry Woods, a surrogate father who is a member of the resistance. His secretary Sylvia, who he was having a torrid affair with, has disappeared. Archer soon discovers that she too is a member of the resistance. The impact on Germany was similar. Google calculates that the air raids in Germany left 3.6 million homes destroyed, 7.5 million people made homeless, and 300,000 to 400,000 civilians dead. To bring this terrifying reality down to human scale, Len Deighton focused on a single mission by RAF Bomber Command in 1943. And the result may leave you appalled by the inhumanity of the generals and political leaders who stood behind this misbegotten strategy. The crime commited is kind of a second plot, like I said the struggle for power of different factions of the Nazis and how the Brittish people try to cope with their new situation is the main course here. Outside Europe and Japan, most people who give any thought to the Allies’s bombing missions in World War II think first, if not only, of the nuclear weapons that dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But those who know are intensely aware that the loss of life in those two cities, horrific though it was, paled beside the toll of the British and US use of strategic bombing (or area bombing, as it’s sometimes known). The firebombing of Tokyo alone left 100,000 civilians dead and one million homeless. That’s about as many who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. And it’s less than a third of the overall civilian death toll in Japanese cities, which was at least 333,000.Oberleutnant Victor Löwenherz, an aristocratic Luftwaffe night fighter pilot and his fellow crew members

Description: It is 18 February 1943, and RAF Lancaster bomber FW 183 - call sign O-Orange - is about to set off on its final mission. It is a raid which will touch the lives of hundreds: the civilians in the small German town of Altgarten, consumed by blazing fire, and the crews, both German and British, men and women.

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The book takes place in a time frame of 24 hours in the summer of 1943 when 600 British bombers go for Krefeld in the Ruhr. Deighton tries to cover a lot of different people and different places. There are British bomber crews, parents to bomber crews, ground crew. German villagers and pilots and radar operators. Really too many people, but it was his choice. Deighton follows in the same literary tradition of British espionage writers as W. Somerset Maugham (left) and Graham Greene (right). Archer had a hard road to walk. He attempted to do his job as a police officer, as a detective and solving crimes. However, this meant working with the Germans, and that obviously put him at odds with the general population who opposed the Germans being there in England. I think the book brought to light how hard it could be for a man who saw himself as honorable and wanting to make a difference in a very difficult situation. I do not know what it is like to exist under an occupying force that will execute as easily as let you live; I cannot adequately imagine how hard that must have been.

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